Netherlands based ABN Amro has become the latest bank to create a new fintech venture fund as it hopes strategic investments can help accelerate its own digital transformation. The new Digital Impact Fund armed with €10 ($11) million will have some initial investing criteria like the bank will only invest in companies which have already launched a product and are currently in the growth phase.
Commenting on the announcement, Menno van Leeuwen, head of ABN Amro’s Innovation Centre Focus Team said,
“The fund will allow the bank to take a strategic stake in a number of promising fintech innovators. Tactically speaking, we’ll soon be able to provide our customers with even better, smarter and more user-friendly products and services. The financial sector can learn a lot from these new players, given their aptitude for responding to, and capitalizing on, customer needs, particularly those of the digital generation.”
While ABN Amro is neither the first bank, nor will it be the last to create funds dedicated to fintech investments, the clear investment requirements that ABN Amero has set out will help guide the bank into making smart investments that can quickly be leveraged into the next generation of ABN Amro’s digital banking and payment products.
For more information in fintech funding in the third quarter of 2015, see Mercator Advisory Group’s Quarterly Payments Pulse released this week.
Overview by Tristan Hugo-Webb, Associate Director, Global Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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